Present day military-grade signal collection and surveillance equipment is used to capture communications transmissions from enemy radios and/or clandestine sources. A crucial piece of this equipment is the wideband receiver. The wideband receiver can intercept various wireless communications over a large subset of the RF spectrum. The interception of various wireless communications is a critical signal intelligence function that is vital for national security interests. The captured signals and raw data energy are then fed to a post-processing stage, where the actual voice or digital data is extracted. For a wideband system with direction-finding capabilities, the direction of the source of the signals is also determined.
Currently, the high end signal collection equipment that is used generates a lot of information; the amount of information exceeds the capabilities of current graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to display the information to the operator. This is a significant problem today. The modern military unit or intelligence organization needs GUI tools to display (intuitively and automatically) the massive amounts of data and computation results that state-of-the-art wideband systems with DF capability generate. This present requirement is critical since currently there are not enough human resources to analyze all captured signal data properly.
Prior art methods for the GUI display of direction attributes of signal data are archaic, because they are designed for use with systems that employ only narrowband receivers. The prior art GUI displays are very limited in their use and incapable of displaying the range of signal attributes detected by today's wideband systems. Among these attributes are frequency, amplitude, and direction.
Over time, the capabilities of wideband systems will grow exponentially. As more and more data is received, modern user interfaces of wideband systems must adapt so as not to overwhelm the user with data. This flood of detected data poses a significant threat to national security since the intelligence information ages quickly, and thus as much of the signal data as possible needs to be understood very quickly. The GUI needs to abstract the data at a high enough level so that the user is protected from the flood of raw information. The raw information is still very important, so while the GUI needs to show a high level of abstraction, the GUI also needs to allow the user to drill down into any specific data of interest. Thus the capability of the GUI must grow exponentially to meet the demands of growing amounts of detected data.
What is needed therefore in order to quickly understand and interact with the many signals detected by modern wideband signal collection systems is a real-time graphical user interface that can handle the display of much information, intuitively and interactively. What is needed is an invention that not only: 1) Preserves the capabilities and intuitive nature of prior art systems, but also 2) adds capabilities far beyond prior art systems, to display many attributes of received signals in various dimensions and graphs, in real time.